Lawrence H. Schiffman
Closely related is the question of contents, which point strongly to the
totally different purposes of the two works. In fact, it is the disparity in con
tents that led to the suggestion by Wacholder that Jubilees might have been
the first part of the Temple Scroll or, better, that the two texts are parts one
and two of a larger work.^21
On one level we can say that the contents of the works are quite differ
ent, since Jubilees is built on the narrative of Genesis and the beginning of
Exodus, up to the destruction of the Egyptians at the Red Sea. Jubilees has a
very significant prologue dealing with the role of Moses in revelation (chap,
l) and appendices regarding Passover (chap. 49), Jubilees (50:1-5), and the
Sabbath (50:6-13).
It is precisely here that the Temple Scroll takes up the story.^22 It re
writes and re-redacts the Torah's material starting (in the scroll as preserved)
in Exod 34 with the covenant and then continuing with the command to
build the tabernacle (here the gargantuan temple) and running through the
middle of Deuteronomy (chap. 20) where the legal section ends.^23 So from a
simple, structural point of view, these works have totally different contents.
However, in reality this is not the case. While the Temple Scroll in
cludes only one reference to the patriarchs, Jubilees includes a fair amount of
material based on the laws of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteron
omy that can be compared with the Temple Scroll. This is because one of the
themes of Jubilees is that the patriarchs observed all the laws included in the
later-to-be-given Torah. Hence, much legal material is recounted in the con
text of telling the biblical stories. Further, for the Sabbath and Passover there
are appendices — minicodes — like the serakhim that make up the Zadokite
Fragments (Damascus Document).^24 Some of these legal discussions repre
sent polemics against what the author considered the illegitimate behavior
of his fellow Jews in the Hellenistic period. Yet at the same time, much of this
material represents simply the transposition of Jewish legal views of the
Vocabulary of the Copper Scroll and the Temple Scroll," in Copper Scroll Studies, ed. G. J.
Brooke and P. R. Davies, JSPSup 40 (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 180-95.
- See above, n. 4.
- See the detailed survey of the contents in Yadin, The Temple Scroll, 1:39-70.
- Note that the preserved Temple Scroll is not complete at the end. See L. H.
Schiffman, "The Unfinished Scroll: A Reconsideration of the End of the Temple Scroll," DSD
15 (2008): 67-78. - L. H. Schiffman, "Legal Texts and Codification in the Dead Sea Scrolls," in Dis
cussing Cultural Influences: Text, Context, and Non-text in Rabbinic Judaism, ed. R. Ulmer,
Studies in Judaism (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2007), 1-39.